A haunting, evocative history of British Empire, told through one woman’s family story
“‘Where are you from?’ was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-war London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.
Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the ‘white Carbys’ and the ‘black Carbys,’ including Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.
Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.”
– Verso
Review
“This beautifully written book raises the bar for political life-writing. Hazel Carby invites readers to follow a reconstructive quest propelled by memory, archive and imagination. It is a journey of discovery that forcefully contextualises the injustice dished out by British governments to the ‘Windrush generation’ and their rebel offspring. Carby disrupts fixed notions of racial identity that contort our understanding of Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history.”
– Paul Gilroy, author of Darker Than Blue and The Black Atlantic
Professor Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent publications include: the introduction to the “Race” section of CCCS Working Papers in Cultural Studies: Volume 2 (London: Routledge, 2007); “US/UK Special Relationship: The Culture of Torture in Abu Ghraib and Lynching Photographs,” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 20 (2007); “Postcolonial Translations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30/2, December 2006; “Becoming a Modern Racialized Subject: ‘detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew,’” Cultural Studies (2008); and “Lost (and Found?) in Translation,” Small Axe, 2009. Hazel Carby is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S.A.
Professor Carby teaches courses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the culture and literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora; through transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; through representations of the black female body; and through the genres of science fiction.